Do notifications really interrupt children’s sleep? How do teens feel after a few hours on TikTok? What interventions can help? 

In answering these questions, DigiPulse will hear from children in Kenya and Brazil, as well as the UK.

DigiPulse is a large-scale international research project examining how children’s everyday smartphone experiences shape their mental health, wellbeing, and development, in real time. 

Funded by the Huo Family Foundation, this project uses an innovative combination of ecological momentary assessment (EMA), passive smartphone data, and longitudinal surveys, to capture children’s digital lives as they unfold across three countries.

By moving beyond simplistic measures such as screen time, DigiPulse generates robust, actionable and contextually sensitive evidence to inform policy, platform governance, education, and child-centred digital design.  

Studying children’s digital experiences across Global Majority and Minority countries will allow us to understand which impacts of smartphone use are universal and which depend on social, cultural, and regulatory contexts. 

Research objectives

• Understand real-time effects of smartphone use on mental health We will generate robust real-time evidence on how everyday smartphone use affects children’s emotional wellbeing and cognitive functioning. By combining EMA with passive app usage data, we will examine how specific patterns of digital engagement relate to changes in mood, anxiety, attention, and cognition as they occur. 

• Identify vulnerability, resilience, and short-term intervention effects We will examine how the relationship between smartphone use and mental health varies across age, gender, and socioeconomic background and geographic setting, enabling the identification of vulnerable and resilient groups. An embedded experimental design will test whether behavioural prompts can improve emotional wellbeing and cognitive focus. 

• Develop a new evidence-based typology of apps We will create an empirically grounded classification of smartphone applications based on their observed psychological effects. 

• Examine cultural and contextual variation across countries We will investigate how patterns of smartphone use and their mental health impacts differ across diverse cultural and social contexts in the UK, Brazil, and Kenya, generating globally relevant insights into children’s digital experiences.  

Child participatory approach 

DigiPulse adopts a child-centred, participatory research approach, ensuring that children’s perspectives shape every stage of the project, from study design and data collection to interpretation and dissemination. In each participating country, child consultative groups will be established to co-design research tools, refine survey questions, and advise on ethical safeguards, accessibility, and relevance. 

This approach ensures that research instruments reflect children’s lived experiences, language, and priorities, while also strengthening data quality and validity. Ongoing engagement will enable children to contribute to sense-making of findings and the development of child-friendly outputs, ensuring that results are meaningful, empowering, and aligned with children’s rights in the digital environment.  

Research outputs 

This three-year project began in January 2026, and research outputs will be published on a rolling basis as they become available. 

Meet the team 

Principal investigator: Sonia Livingstone 

Project lead: Kim R. Sylwander 

Research team members UK: Mariya Stoilova, Ben Carter (King’s College) and Nicola Kalk (King’s College).  

Research partners Brazil: Dr Ivelise Fortim (research lead Brazil) and Alana Institute. 

Research partner Kenya: Mtoto News. 

Research collaborator and technical partner: Revealing Reality 

Child participation partner: Child and Youth Friendly Governance Project 

Banner image by Mary Taylor via Pexels.

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